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David Hayden [MVP C#]

.NET Tutorials, Patterns, and Practices

Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 Book Review

Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 From Novice to Professional ( Apress, Amazon ) by Cristian Darie and Karli Wilson is a step-by-step guide to creating an online store for a business. The book is jam packed with code samples and stored procedures that are used in the creation of the storefront, so you not only get what appears to be a fully-functioning e-commerce website, but a good introduction and training on how to create a simple 3-layer, SQL Server Database web application using a generic data access layer, stored procedures, middle-tier business objects, and a presentation layer using ASP.NET 2.0 and usercontrols.

What I Liked

The book has several positives that not only make it a good beginning e-commerce book, but a good book to learn ASP.NET 2.0 database-driven development:

A good introduction to n-layer ASP.NET web development.
Great coverage of stored procedures for CRUD, catalog searching, etc.
Tips on how to extend or change the online store in places where the book took shortcuts.
Excellent coverage on the theory and then implementation of an order pipeline.
Useful information on handling credit card transactions / processing and integration to DataCash, etc.
A brief mention on Waterfall and Agile Software Development.

Areas For Improvement

Given the recent emphasis on the provider model by Microsoft and the fact that e-commerce is so commonplace, I think the book should have addressed some additional “beginning“ features and concepts to move up with the times:

Provider model implementation of the catalog, shopping cart, etc. similar to Commerce Starter Kit.
Product Attributes. This is a pretty standard need for a simple online store.
URL ReWriting to help with search engine positioning.
A chapter on search engine optimization and positioning.

Who Should Buy This Book

If you are looking for a book that is literally filled with code samples ( especially data access related ) and stored procedures to help you build a basic e-commerce website, Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 is an excellent book for you. The examples get somewhat repetitive, but this is the kind of reinforcement a new developer needs to learn the basics.

The book is also good about explaining the theory behind why it does something and how it can be improved, which also introduces one to new ideas and concepts that go beyond just e-commerce development.

Conclusion

I, personally, enjoyed reading this book, because I have a special fondness for books that actually create something and explain both the technical and theory behind its creation in a step-by-step format. Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 provides a good introduction to e-commerce development, n-layer ASP.NET development, and stored procedures. New developers to ASP.NET will enjoy and learn a lot from the practical discussions and myriad of code samples.

Related E-Commerce Info:

Published Dec 27 2005, 01:58 PM by David Hayden

Filed under: .NET Book Reviews

Comments

Ian Smith said:

For me this book suffers from the same problem that Wrox Press books used to suffer from - code that doesn't work on the RTM code, and when the whole book is aimed at beginners and based around typing in code and "learning by doing", as this one is, it's inexcusable - particularly when updates aren't made available online.

Despite the fact the book was published just after RTM at around the same time as several other books (including Microsoft Press' own Step-by-Step series) it's based on Beta 2 (from February) and things have changed so that menu items referred to aren't there and some instructions just won't work and will take the novice some figuring out to get to the bottom of. At the sort of price books like this are selling it that's just not good enough in my view (particularly when these books can sit in stores for two-three years with the gullible purchaser not realising the book reflects code that was never meant for the general public) and I sincerely hope the publishers get a second edition out that's corrected for the RTM version, because there's much of value in here for the programmer new to ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005 etc.

It's interesting to note that even though Microsoft Press' own similarly-styled "Step by Step" book on C# came out around the same time all of its examples (bar a couple of easy-to-spot typo's) work on the RTM version, proving it is possible to get a tutorial/training book out on time that doesn't make you feel you've been cheated and scratching your head wondering why it doesn't reflect the software you're using. Apparently the Microsoft Press book was based on the August CTP so I guess they got to rewrite the book to a code release six months later than the Apress book, even though both came out around the same time.

# December 27, 2005 3:26 PM

David Hayden said:

That's great feedback, Ian.

I didn't download the source code so was not aware of the problem with the code not working on the RTM bits. If the reader is new to ASP.NET development, which like you said is pretty much the targeted audience, working code is a MUST. Heck with that. Working code with a book is always a MUST! I totally agree.

I will download the code and check it out to see if the problem by chance has been corrected.

Commerce Starter Kit ( CSK ) has a really good community supporting it, so if new developers are looking for examples of good, open source e-commerce solutions that actually work, they can go to the following url:

http://www.commercestarterkit.org/

It uses the provider model and has good support from PayPal and Microsoft.

# December 27, 2005 4:53 PM

Jason Haley said:

# December 28, 2005 8:27 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Nice Review!

# December 29, 2005 4:21 PM

ScottBellware said:

This book looked pretty compelling until I got to the part early in the text where the business classes were shown to be static utility classes that returned instances of DataTable.

Yet another book about how to do low testability, procedural programming in .NET isn't what I was hoping for. There looks to be some good examples for how to use some of the ASP stuff, and for hooking up to PayPal and Amazon, but this book communicates only a bare minimum of beginner application design.

For me, it gets low points for reinforcing low sustainability practices.

# January 1, 2006 7:49 PM

David Hayden said:

True. From a testability standpoint it deserves negative 5 marks.

I am not convinced testability is entirely necessary for this simple e-commerce solution presented in the book, however, since it is mostly data access with very few business rules. And what few business rules do exist have been placed in the stored procedures.

Do you know of a starter kit or open source solution that is simple enough for beginners to comprehend and has a suite of tests? I have never found one.

# January 1, 2006 10:32 PM

ScottBellware said:

I haven't found a starter kit yet that does a good job of showing more than beginner-level approaches for sustainable software design. I'm trying to spend some effort on this kind of project, but time is prime.

As to business logic in stored procedures... that's a big red flag for testability. When business logic has to be tested inside another sub-system - a database in this example - unit testing goes out the window, and with it goes the productivity expectations that a developer with non-trivial experience with agile development would expect.

I haven't read deeply enough into the stored procs to know whether the logic in the stored procs *should* be in the procs, or that it's there because the developers have no instrument at their disposal to point out which logic should be housed inside the database and which logic should be in plain-old unit testable code libraries.

So, speaking more generally, we're still at a stage very early in wholesale understanding of agile designs in the developer community at large. While that long transition is in progress, we'll see allocations of runtime resources to infrastructure nodes that don't make sense for agility and sustainability. Which ultimately means that we're still susceptible to the 2 or 3 year slash-and-burn cycle for system re-writes versus building changeable systems using hard design guidelines that support changeability.

At this point in the game, I tend to poo-poo books that don't address sustainability. It strikes me as the same old charletanism that's driving the industry's software project/product failure rate.

This book would be much more compelling to me if it had been more than a feature walk++. Not that a feature walk isn't what's needed at this point in the new revision of .NET and ASP, but we're at a point in the lifeline of our industry when addressing agility, testability, and sustainability are more than past due.

# January 2, 2006 2:43 PM

David Hayden [MVP C#]

Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 Book Review

What I Liked

Areas For Improvement

Who Should Buy This Book

Conclusion

Related E-Commerce Info:

Comments

Ian Smith said:

David Hayden said:

Jason Haley said:

Brendan Tompkins said:

ScottBellware said:

David Hayden said:

ScottBellware said:

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